


a thirst only deserts know best

by mapped



Series: chances are (we are the same) [2]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: Anal Sex, Dirty Talk, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-17
Updated: 2017-09-17
Packaged: 2018-12-30 16:08:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12112344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mapped/pseuds/mapped
Summary: Flint doesn't have a recipe for dealing with Silver, but he does have a lot of other recipes. He's also terribly in love.Set at some vague point shortly before the beginning of S4.





	a thirst only deserts know best

**Author's Note:**

> Written as a sequel to [we lean like gardens (toward light)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11659671), but you don't have to have read that one to enjoy this one.

It was something to walk towards his cabin knowing that Silver would be in there. Silver spent so much time in there these days, and it was not at all the same as those weeks when Silver had lain fevered and fainting in his cabin on the Spanish warship, leg freshly amputated. Then, it had been a strange and awful thing, withdrawing into his cabin to sit with his grief, but having to sit with Silver at the same time too, until he couldn’t tell the difference between the two, until Silver and his grief looked one and the same, and his cabin was a mausoleum of dead things all: him and Silver and the rotting, putrid ugliness of both their pain.

Now, he walked towards his cabin, and it pulled sweetly on him. He remembered walking into the Hamiltons’ house one evening: the halls had been gloomy—even the wealth of flickering candles barely made an impression on a cold night such as that—but from down the hallway he’d heard a beguiling melody on the harpsichord, and it had been rapture. That music had enfolded him and transported him directly down the hallway to Miranda, to Thomas, and he had been afloat the whole time, unaware of something so mortal as motion, exalted above heavy boots and creaking floors.

That was what it felt like to walk towards his cabin now, knowing Silver was there.

He reached his cabin and knocked, and at the first rap of knuckle against wood caught himself. Since when had he started knocking on the door of his own damn cabin? He wasn’t sure. Was this the first time?

He found he didn’t much care, and let his knuckles tap upon the door a second time. It was his cabin; it was Silver’s cabin. What difference did it make, when Silver had been inside him, when Silver had warmed himself by the hearth of Flint’s heart?

As he pressed on through, he thought he even _liked_ it. He liked having to knock on his own door. It wasn’t his alone anymore.

Silver’s headful of curls came into view first, glossy as the cover of a new book but loose as a sheaf of unbound pages. Silver turned, smiling already, and the sight of that smile curled around one of Flint’s ribs and settled there like a cat.

“You actually have a _recipe book_ ,” Silver said, petting the page that was open on the desk, his rings glinting. “And you never shared it with your ship’s cook?” 

Flint’s chair sat empty opposite Silver; Flint didn’t think he’d ever seen anyone else occupy that chair in the time he’d been captain. “Those recipes are useless on a ship,” he said dismissively, even though he knew that Silver wasn’t going to let it go.

“Why the fuck do you have this?” Silver was carelessly sliding his thumb back and forth along the edge of the page, and Flint wanted to stop him for fear of the paper cutting him, but he swallowed his tongue, because they were _pirates_ , for God’s sake. “When was the last time you cooked?”

“Does that time I taught you how to roast a pig count?”

“That was _me_ doing the cooking,” Silver countered. “You merely instructed.”

Flint shrugged. “For Miranda then, I suppose.”

Silver’s eyes softened. “Of course.” He looked back at the page, and now his fingers traced a word that Flint was too far away to read. “These are in your handwriting. You collected these recipes yourself.”

“Yes,” Flint said. He strolled up to his chair and calmly sat down. “You’re wondering if I’ve really made everything in there.”

“Well, yes,” Silver said. “That, and when I’ll be granted the privilege of tasting your cooking, Captain.” His face was bright, like the sun had left behind a remnant of its light there on the canvas of his cheeks. “When will I get to try this lemon pudding, for instance?” That was the word he was tracing. ‘Lemon’.

Flint allowed himself to think briefly of that nebulous possibility that was life after the war. Butter, and eggs, and lemon. The fragrant tang of citrus clinging to his hands. “If it wasn’t for the rest of the crew,” he said, brushing his knuckles against his quill—the idea of life after the war felt as light as that, just barely-there wisps—“I would cook for you. If it meant I wouldn’t have to eat anything you make.”

“Half of me wants to protest that my cooking surely isn’t that bad anymore, and half of me is happy to put up with that insult because it _really_ wants to taste your cooking.”

“For the record,” Flint said, flicking the recipe book with a finger that just avoided contact with Silver’s hand, “I have indeed made everything in there at least once, and I can promise you that it’s all fucking delectable.”

Silver laughed, and his throat was beautiful like rigging, like the rope that holds a ship together. “Do you know, when I stole the _Urca_ schedule, and I was trying to find out what it was, I told Dufresne that I was looking for my recipes? That I’d left them with my captain for safekeeping? It sounded like horseshit even to me, but now, with you as my captain, it seems much more plausible.”

Flint couldn’t help but laugh too. He bet Silver didn’t even know what a recipe _looked_ like back then. “If you _had_ any recipes,” he said, “I would keep them safe.”

“Actually, I’ve noticed an appalling lack of eel recipes in your book,” Silver said, a grin like the crescent moon between his lips. “I have some fantastic ones that I could write down for your safekeeping.”

Flint shook his head. God help him, he was so fond of this ridiculous man, he even thought of half-starved Silver squeezing the guts from slimy eels with a stupid warmth that bordered on ardour. “I’m not sure I want your eel recipes to taint my collection,” he said. “But perhaps you could start your own.”

“The crowning dish in my collection would obviously be raw shark,” Silver said, and his hand found Flint’s on the desk. He stroked Flint’s knuckles, and Flint shivered and turned his palm upward, so that he could hold Silver’s hand.

“That one was a collaborative effort though, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, I’ll admit that,” Silver said, and he looked at their linked hands. “I could’ve watched you eat that shark meat forever.”

That was a queer thing to say. Flint’s chest felt tight, and he glanced away at his bookcase. No words came to his tongue. With Silver he found he was so often content to say nothing. In the silence he could always hear the sound of Silver’s existence, soft as rain touching the earth and just as vital.

“Dufresne told me that you like your books,” Silver murmured. “That was the first real thing I learnt about you.”

Flint had forgotten, that this was what it was to be in the first flush of love. It was to experience every word the other person said as a dusting of sugar on your tongue, or as the slow, rich slide of wine down your throat, until you were giddy with it, until your pulse sang.

“If that was the first real thing you learnt about me,” Flint said, “what was the first real thing I learnt about you?”

The light dimmed in Silver’s face, as though obscured by a cloud, and Flint hurried to say, “I know plenty of real things about you.” He squeezed Silver’s hand. “And chief among them is that you always care, more deeply than you let on.” _More deeply than you know._

The cloud was still there, but Silver squeezed back. “I believe the first real thing you learnt about me is that I’m emphatically _not_ a cook.”

Flint smiled. “I think you may be right,” he said, sinking back into his chair and watching as Silver’s shoulders mirrored his own, the tension in them slackening. “You’re so alarmingly incompetent at cooking that it’s a defining personality trait of yours.”

“Hold on, we forgot the actual answer: I’m a thief.” Silver’s head quirked at the same time as his mouth, and Flint wanted to kiss Silver’s jaw.

“We’re all thieves here,” Flint said quietly, “and we two are the kings of thieves.” He drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. “You could sit in this chair too, if you wanted.”

The smiling lines in Silver’s face ceded to a different jumble of creases, and he opened his mouth. Then he paused, as if reordering his thoughts, and smoothed his face over before he spoke: “When you were with Thomas, you must have worked in his… in his office. His study. Correct?”

“Correct,” Flint echoed, not understanding how this followed. But he was willing to go where Silver led.

“So,” Silver said, “there must have been a desk. His desk.”

Ah. Now Flint thought he knew where this was heading. “Yes, there was a desk in Thomas’ office.”

“Did you ever sit in his chair?” Silver asked.

“No.”

“Did you ever wish to?”

“No.”

“There,” Silver said. His hand slipped from Flint’s grasp. “It was his chair. You were partners, but that didn’t mean you could take his place. The two of you sat talking of your plans, just as you and I do now. But that chair is yours.” He stood up, and his iron leg thudded on the floor as he walked around to Flint’s side of the desk. Flint’s gaze tracked every movement, until Silver’s hand touched his again, this time overlapping his on the arm of the chair. “I don’t ever want to take your place, Captain.”

Flint thought of himself sitting opposite Thomas, looking at Thomas across the desk. Papers and pamphlets lying between them. He’d never once compared that room to this cabin, because the two places were so different. One overflowed with books and opulence, gleaming paintings and silken furnishings and dark panelled walls that could not muffle the abundance of light and colour.

The other was this. Flaking grey walls, hard chairs, and a paltry bookshelf, everything pale and monotonous.

But he was on the other side of the desk now, with the windows behind him, and wasn’t it just the slightest bit similar?

Silver bent and kissed him, and it illuminated the room. The chair felt cushioned beneath Flint, the arm of it gilded. Silver’s mouth was so warm, and Flint wanted to draw him closer. He reached for Silver’s waist, but Silver broke the kiss and twisted round, and then he was falling upon Flint’s lap, an overwhelming weight on Flint’s thighs, his back aligned with Flint’s chest, his hair falling in Flint’s face.

Flint turned his head to the side and took a minute just to breathe, and even that was too much, his chest rising with each breath into the pane of Silver’s back. He didn’t know what to do with his hands, which dangled uselessly over the arms of the chair. Eventually, he croaked, “What… are you doing?”

“I don’t want to sit in your chair, Captain,” Silver said, “but I certainly don’t mind sitting on you.”

Flint couldn’t see Silver’s expression, but he guessed Silver was smiling. He snaked an arm around Silver’s waist, and—whatever, if Silver was going to do something so outrageous as to sit on him, he would damn well take advantage of it—he brushed aside the drape of Silver’s hair and kissed Silver’s nape. Silver was perfectly placed for this, and _God_ but that man loved being kissed on the back of his neck. With every press of Flint’s mouth, Silver whined and squirmed hotly in Flint’s lap. Aimlessly, at first, a reflex that meant nothing, but then purposefully, his arse grinding down into Flint’s groin.

Flint groaned, tightening his arm around Silver, trying to hold him even closer, but he realised, burying his teeth in Silver’s teeth and making Silver cry out, that what he really wanted was more _skin_. “Take off your shirt,” he muttered, pushing on Silver’s shoulders to make him shuffle forward and give them both enough room for this. They cast their shirts onto the floor, and Flint pulled Silver close again, and _ah_ , that was it, that was perfect. The expanse of contact between Silver’s back and Flint’s chest felt as though it were as eternally wide as the night sky, and lit with the same stars.

He nipped the back of Silver’s neck again, took his time to kiss the same spot generously until it reddened. His hands clutched at Silver’s sides, slipping in their mingled sweat, and there was so _much_ of Silver—he didn’t feel solid in this moment, but something intangible and uncontainable, an elemental thing that was spilling through Flint’s fingers. 

Flint’s hips rolled up as he sought friction, rubbing himself against Silver’s arse. That was the only point of solidity between them, the place where fabric still separated them from each other. Flint dug the heel of his palm into the crotch of Silver’s trousers, and Silver gasped and jerked, his head whirling round so he could kiss Flint. His hand gripped Flint’s chin a little too hard, but Flint merely bit Silver’s lip in response, and sucked on the tip of Silver’s tongue, and they were just _animals_ , just serpents coiling around each other, just lions snarling into each other’s red fanged mouths.

Flint’s chest was fusing into Silver’s back, he was sure of it.

“I want to ride you,” Silver breathed, between kisses. “Let me ride you.”

“If you manage to accomplish that on this chair,” Flint said, yanking a handful of curls so that Silver leant his head further to the side, revealing more of his neck for Flint’s lips to find, “I’d be very surprised.”

Silver huffed and pawed angrily at his own trousers, and Flint had to grab his hands and say, “Wait, that wasn’t a challenge, I only meant we should get on the bed.”

“I’m not sure it’d be any easier on that damned bed, but if you say so.” Silver kissed Flint again before he sprang from Flint’s lap, and oh, they weren’t fused together after all.

He didn’t even have time to lament the absence of Silver’s weight, because now that Silver’s back wasn’t right up against him, he was stupefied by its spectacle, spellbound by the ripple of muscle it presented. The sight of one of Silver’s shoulder blades was enough to cut clean through him like a ship’s prow through water. Those dimples at the small of Silver’s back were two minute whirlpools that somehow drowned the breath from Flint.

He recovered when Silver reached the bed and sat down on it. “At least it’s not a hammock,” he said.

Silver laughed amid unstrapping his false leg, and Flint stood up unsteadily, only just remembering to bring the jar of oil in one of his desk drawers with him. He peeled his trousers off his hips as he got to the bed, and while he was kicking them from his feet, Silver pounced on him, crowding him down. He was pushed flat on his back, and Silver, now naked too, straddled him and rocked against him. The bed swayed forwards and back with Silver’s movements, but Flint felt as if the entire world was spinning as Silver’s cock slid against his own, the friction of it pure and hot and wonderful, liquid pleasure flowing from the base of Flint’s spine to flood each individual vertebra.

Even as dizzy as he was, Flint had just enough wits remaining to dip his fingers into the jar of oil. His dripping hand squeezed Silver’s arsecheek, and his gaze caught on Silver’s white teeth as Silver bit his lip that was already plump from all their earnest kissing earlier. Flint’s heart skidded, his stomach swooping low with desire. He caressed Silver’s hole with an oily thumb, and Silver groaned, falling on top of Flint, chest to chest. He rested there while Flint’s fingers slipped inside him, and Flint listened, enamoured, to each whimper that escaped Silver’s throat. The flutter of Silver’s hole, by turns clamping down on Flint’s fingers and relaxing, was erotic beyond all dreams.

“Fuck me,” Silver sighed. “Just like that, _yes_.” His hair was stuck damply in clumps to his neck, the usually lively curls flattened out by sweat, and even lovelier for it. Flint nuzzled Silver’s neck and inhaled. It smelled like a forest under a fine, misty drizzle.

He kissed Silver’s neck, kneading Silver’s arse and thrusting his fingers deep and slow, until Silver was a pliant, softly gasping thing above him. Time unspooled like a velvet ribbon around them both and bound them closer and closer, and Silver was clearly enjoying this so much that he could have been content just letting Flint finger him for the rest of the afternoon, and Flint could have been content doing it.

But Silver finally said, shakily, “I think I was supposed to ride you.”

“I think you did claim you wanted to do that at one point, yes,” Flint said.

“Right, I’m getting round to it.” Silver pressed his lips against the underside of Flint’s jaw, before nudging Flint’s hand away from his arse. He stroked Flint’s cock, which had softened a little, until it was stiff and slick with oil, and Flint’s breath hitched hopelessly. He watched as Silver rose on his knees so that he could sit back down, this time on the length of Flint’s cock, and then Flint wasn’t watching anymore; he was simply _feeling_ , as plush, unbearable heat wrapped around him, slowly, slowly. 

It felt like the height of luxury, that slow, lazy descent; like the most shameless decadence. 

Silver was sat fully upon him now, and Flint struggled to keep breathing. He trailed his fingers up Silver’s abdomen, which swelled and deflated weakly. The two of them were just breathing, breathing in unison. Shallow and tight and trembling.

Then Silver moved, and cursed, because it _was_ difficult on this damned bed, which swung along with every movement. He tried to grind down gently, rolling his hips in sedate circles, but Flint was _done_ with slow. He grabbed Silver’s arse in both hands, squeezing and spreading exactly the way he knew would drive Silver wild. Silver’s whole body shuddered and he punched his fist into the mattress.

“Fuck this,” he growled, flinging his right leg out to one side so he had one foot on the floor. Flint laughed, but his laughter evanesced when Silver leaned over him and grasped the rope from which the bed was suspended, because _Christ_ , Silver’s chest and arms looked so good above him like that. Flint had seen marble statues that he’d marvelled at because they appeared so lifelike, as if stone could be tender, could yield. This was the opposite of that: muscles so well-honed, so sharply-defined that Flint was afraid he would touch Silver and find he was made merely of stone.

Breathless, with a heaviness in his belly that was such intense arousal it became a kind of trepidation, Flint touched Silver’s arm. And the muscle was firm, certainly, but it wasn’t stone. It was soft skin that yielded to Flint’s fingertips.

He met Silver’s eyes as Silver lifted himself up by the rope and then dropped back down again, and the air left them both each time Silver’s hips returned to Flint’s. The bed was stabler now that Silver was anchoring it, and as Silver panted above Flint, shoulders flexing and rolling gloriously with each rise, each fall, Flint gripped Silver’s thighs to keep him steady, to keep them both steady.

“Do you want to know what I’m thinking right now?” Silver asked.

“Do I?”

“I’m wondering what it might be like if we pretended to be other people,” Silver said, and jabbed his hips down in such a way that they both closed their eyes and moaned.

“What do you mean?” Flint said, the words half-gasped. He had often looked at ordinary people and _wanted_ to exchange his life for theirs, wanted to lead a simple life without trouble and turmoil, wanted to know peace, with the world and with himself. But it was an impossibility, and were it a real choice, he wasn’t sure it would be an easy one. This was the life that had its hooks in him. It was what he had, and despite the violence, despite the blood and the misery and the endless, constant fight against the world and against himself, he had made something of it. When he looked at Silver now, he didn’t think he could swap his life for anyone else’s.

His was the life that held this moment, as a clamshell holds a pearl.

“I mean,” Silver said, “you told me Thomas went to Eton. Did you and Thomas never imagine you were both at Eton, two fumbling, fresh-faced schoolboys sneaking off and trying not to get caught by a schoolmaster?”

All right, maybe this moment wasn’t a pearl. Silver’s audacity was honestly unbelievable, but Flint supposed this was one of the things that made him love Silver. _Damn_ him.

“No, we never did that,” he mumbled, but he was now thinking of the time he had told Thomas of his furtive encounters in the Navy, and they had shyly enacted one such encounter, forcing themselves to be gruff and curt to each other when they would normally have lingered over each touch, and it had been shockingly good and gratifying, to transform a turbulent act that could not have been acknowledged out of shame into something else, something controlled, something conscious. Something that was only play, but serious too, and weighted with love.

“Well, you should have,” Silver said, and Flint shoved at Silver’s chest.

“Just shut the hell up and fuck me,” he grunted.

“Don’t you want to pretend?” Silver asked sweetly.

Flint closed his fingers around Silver’s cock and tugged at it, sliding his fist up and down. “I want to pretend that you’re still the worst cook this world has ever seen and you’ve just tried to tell me you’ve roasted a pig when you clearly _haven’t_ and I throw you over my desk and fuck you relentless and hard until you’re begging me, just begging me to let you come”—Silver was gasping with pleasure as Flint pumped his cock and he slammed himself down on Flint with abandon—“but I won’t let you come because you don’t deserve it, and I only want to use you, I only want your tight hole around my cock so that you can make me come, so that you’ll learn better than to serve me undercooked pig next time.” Silver was laughing now, his breaths like sobs as he spattered Flint’s chest with his warm seed.

“Goddammit,” Silver said, the crinkles around his eyes deep and soft. He drove his hips down into Flint again. “I hate you.”

That did it for Flint, the elated, effortless love in those three words, punctuated by the motion of Silver’s hips. He felt rarefied by pleasure and levitated above his own body as he came; he was vapour rising into the air and dissolving in the shimmering water of Silver’s eyes.

Silver shifted and groaned. “Wow, you were loud,” he said, collapsing by Flint’s side, drawing up his leg back onto the bed and letting it lie carelessly across Flint’s legs.

Flint hadn’t even realised he had been making noise. His face heated, and he silently nosed Silver’s shoulder.

“You know,” Silver said, his hand rubbing thoughtfully over Flint’s shaved head. “Madi doesn’t know how to cook either.” 

“She’s a princess,” Flint muttered. “She doesn’t need to know how to cook. She’s got plenty of other matters to attend to.”

“Yes, but can you imagine if we’re going to live together one day?” Silver said. His hand continued to massage the same soothing patterns on Flint’s head. “What the fuck would we do? She makes a face every time she has to eat my cooking on this ship. We might _starve_. We’d really need your lemon pudding then, wouldn’t we.”

Flint snorted and kissed Silver’s shoulder, then lay his head back on his pillow. “You could hire somebody. And it’s not going to be me.”

“Aw, are you sure you don’t want to be my personal servant?” Silver propped his head up on an elbow and grinned. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed you knocking on the door of your own cabin, Captain.”

Flint studied Silver’s sunlit face with its garland of sweat-damp curls. “Do you want me to stop?” he asked.

“No,” Silver said, after a moment’s consideration. “That you can keep doing.” 

He tapped his knuckles twice against Flint’s chest, right over Flint’s heart, a knock that resonated throughout the whole of Flint’s body.

His heart was already open; it would always be open to Silver. His eyes flickered from Silver to the plain wooden beams in the ceiling, and back to Silver again. This tired old cabin was after all as sumptuous and lavish as any room covered in tapestries and filled with sculptures.

He only needed to look at Silver for it to be so.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are really appreciated. <3 Come find me on [tumblr](http://reluming.tumblr.com/)!


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